Reduce your PC’s power consumption with a Power Regimen.

The only place you used to have to worry about your computer using too much power was in midflight at 35,000 feet. These days load shedding, blackouts, brownouts and the coming increase in electricity rates have brought these concerns back down on the agenda. Managing your computers appetite for energy can save you money, increase its life and prevent data loss.

The flow of electricity is measured in Watts. In your average computer, the hard drive will use between 5 and 25 watts, your CPU will use between 50 and 95 watts and your flat screen monitor between 40 and 60 watts. A well furbished computer running full ball will burn anything from 300 to 500 watts – and sometimes more.

Eskom charges you based on how many kilowatt-hours you use. My last known electricity bill was 32 cents per unit of electricity (kilowatt hour). If my computer uses 500 Watts at full ball, that’s almost 16 cents per hour.

Sound like nothing? If you’re like me and your PC is turned on for 40 hours a week, your electricity bill could range in the hundreds every year. If you keep your PC on for three years, the amount of power youre using could represent a sizable portion of your computer’s original price.

Most PCs now support either Advanced Power Management (APM) or the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). To check your PC, select Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, click the Device Manager tab, open the System devices listing, and look for entries with either 'APM' or 'ACPI' in the name. If you don't find either, power management may be disabled or not installed on your PC--and enabling it can be tricky.

APM, the older and less flexible standard, has five settings, ranging from full on to APM off (see Figure 1). Adjust the settings in either the CMOS setup program or Control Panel's Power Management utility. The settings can conflict, however, so you may have to experiment.

Open your system's CMOS setup program--typically by pressing Delete or F1 as the PC boots up--and go to the Power Management menu. If there's no menu specifically for power, look through the other menus; you're certain to find something. When you do, choose the option that enables APM.

If this causes problems, force your PC to use the earlier--and potentially more compatible--APM version 1. Go back to Device Manager and choose Advanced Power Management support under 'System devices.' Choose the Settings tab and then check Force APM 1.0 mode (see Figure 2).

If your PC is fairly recent, it may support the newer ACPI specification, which is part of the OnNow effort by Microsoft and others to make PCs easier to use and to let them boot up and shut down faster.

ACPI's Standby mode makes restarts easy, and it allows a PC to "wake up" automatically to process e-mail, modem calls, prescheduled tasks, and other external input. It improves on APM by letting you control the power consumption of individual components. At the very least, Control Panel's Power Management utility should offer power control over the hard disk and the monitor.

You'll conserve the most power by setting your monitor to power down. Some 19-inch monitors devour up to 150 watts. Powering down is much better than running a screen-saver program. You'll extend your monitor's life while suppressing its voracious appetite.

Power Supply Calculator

Use your digital video camera as a webcam

It's possible to get the experience of webcam chat withot using a webcam.You can use your video camera as a webcam with the help of a video capture card.You can buy this video capture card in less money than the webcam.you have to follow the following steps:

1.Buy a video capture card.You can buy a TV tuner card/video captur card combo.In combo you will also be able to watch TV on your PC.

2.Then install the card and it's software into the PC.

3.If you bought just a capture card than you don't need to make any changes . If you bought a TV tuner card than open the TV viewer program and switch it over to the video in setting instead of television before using it.

4.Plug your camera's video output into the card's input using the appropriate cable. Once the camera is hooked up, turn it on and use your card's viewing software to confirm that you're actually receiving signal from the camera.

5. Now login to IM and select the video capture device from the list.Then press the "start webcam conversation" button.Then turn on the camera, point it at yourself, and you're ready to go.

How to make free mobile email Id

We all are familiar with the concept of free Web mail Id on internet.pesently, we are accessing our web mails on mobile phones but the device compatibility and monthly charges are major problems.Now the Indian company Adroit Claretdene Infotech has started a new concept of free e-mail service for mobile phones.The name of the service is email@mobile.

Features of this service are:
1.It will offer a free mobile email ID to the internet browsing mobile phone users.Mobile must be GPRS-enabled.

2.This service is only for those mobiles which supports WAP 1.2 and above browsers.Those mobile users will be able to access email and register for new email ID without any charges.

3.Only browsing fees will be charged by network provider.

4.Reading text,attachment,reply,composing new mail,delete,send email,set up address book etc. are the some features of email@mobile.

5.It does not require any software installation on the mobile phone.

6.You can make your free mobile email ID on www.emailatmobile.com.

How to create secret partition in Windows

You might have heard in news about the investigation reports that the investigators have found a secret partition in the computers that they were investigating.This is supposed to be a very tough task and usually normal computers users does not indulge in the activities like this it might be because that they don't know how to do this or they don't have such a situation to hide the data so secretly.

So if you want to create a secret partition or want to hide a partition in windows then this post is for you.Drives can be hidden using the Registry editor. To open the Windows Registry go to start->run , type regedit and hit enter. Now navigate to the Registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Policies \Explorer if you want to hide drives for the current user or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \policies \Explorer if you want to hide them for all users and create a new Dword (right-click free space on the right pane, select New > Dword) and name it NoDrives.

Now you have to deal with the value of this NoDrives.Enter the values from the table below accordingly.

Drive A: - Value 1
Drive B: - Value 2
Drive C: - Value 4
Drive D: - Value 8
Drive E: - Value 16
Drive F: - Value 32
Drive G: - Value 64
Drive H: - Value 128
Drive I: - Value 256

like in order of 2^n where the n is the number of drive in sequence e.g. the number of A is zero and B is one and so on.

You can also hide the multiple drives for this just add their values and put there, like for for drive B and C add 2+4=6 and place 6 in the value of NoDrives.

Lock your folder without using any software

This is a different way to lock up ur folder without using any software.This is not hiding ur folder but locking it..using batch file... What is batch file??? It is this file (command.com) which handles all DOS commands that you +give at the DOS prompt---such as COPY, DIR, DEL etc.

code...
cls
@ECHO OFF
title Folder Locker
if EXIST "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" goto UNLOCK
if NOT EXIST Locker goto MDLOCKER
:CONFIRM
echo Are you sure u want to Lock the folder(Y/N)
set/p "cho=>"
if %cho%==Y goto LOCK
if %cho%==y goto LOCK
if %cho%==n goto END
if %cho%==N goto END
echo Invalid choice.
goto CONFIRM
:LOCK
ren Locker "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
attrib +h +s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
echo Folder locked
goto End
:UNLOCK
echo Enter password to Unlock folder
set/p "pass=>"
if NOT %pass%==type your password here goto FAIL
attrib -h -s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
ren "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" Locker
echo Folder Unlocked successfully
goto End
:FAIL
echo Invalid password
goto end
:MDLOCKER
md Locker
echo Locker created successfully
goto End
:End

steps to do it........
1) Copy the give code in a note pad and save the note pad in your pc with the name name.bat (that is with the extension of .bat). you can replace the name portion with anything u want.
( In place of password in the code given type your desired password.)

2) A batch file will be created where you have saved. Now double click on it , it will make a folder with the name locker at the same place where the batch file is save.

3) Now add the files you want to be locked in that folder.

4) Double click on the batch file. It will ask for locking the folder formed. Type y(yes). The folder will be locked and hidden.

5) To unlock,double click on batch file again and enter the password in the new window opened.